Digiculture

There’s no shortage of commentary on my friend Keola Donaghy’s disastrous experience with Irish immigration last Friday – including further explanations from Keola himself.

I use the word “disastrous” deliberately. However I do not mean that it is disastrous for Keola and his family, who will eventually get over the experience – however upsetting. I mean that it is disastrous for Ireland, as a country, and for the companies and academic institutions here who hope to attract collaboration from experienced professionals such as Keola.

Let me make this clear: Keola was doing us a favour by coming here. He could have chosen any country in the world to do his doctoral research in. He could have chosen many which would offer him a far better standard of living in terms of the value for money and currency exchange rate he would get for the US dollars he planned to spend here. He was the ultimate high-value tourist, prepared to spend up to a year in which he and his wife and child would pour their hard-earned US currency into the local economy.

He was a paying customer, and we treated him like shit.

I haven’t even mentioned the “intangible” benefits which he would have brought. These are not things you bring up in an individual immigration interview, but they are one of the reasons why “cultural intercourse” was valid reason for visas even in Cold War days, and they support several of the aims and “core values” in the programme for government of our ruling parties.

Keola is a leading light in the movement for preservation and promotion of the Hawaiian laguage, and that fact, coupled with his own Irish heritage has led him to take a keen interest in the Irish language also. He’s studied Irish with Oideas Gael in Gleann Cholmcille, and written extensively in support of the Irish language on issues such as EU Status, immersive education, software localisation and provision of multimedia programming. He has been a contributor to radio programmes and to printed publications here in Ireland, offering a uniquely qualified perspective based on the many similarities in the Irish language and Native Hawaiian experiences.

In addition to his teaching, Keola is also an accomplished musician and songwriter, and a record producer with extensive contacts in the Hawaiian music industry. Underlying his artistic and cultural leanings is a strong technological bent. For decades he has been to the forefront of efforts to localise software for the Hawaiian language. He’s been a blogging pioneer since the days of Frontier and Manila and his first podcasts in 2005 were part of the inspiration for my own entry into that field.

On Friday, as Keola and his family were boarding a flight back to New York, in my frustration I phoned the International Student Office in University College Cork. This is the organisation responsible for liaising with Keola on his move to Ireland. I had one question for them: “how could this happen?”

The person I spoke to had had a busy day. Along with their colleagues in the Irish Council for International Students, they had encountered similar frustration in their efforts to explain the situation to the Garda National Immigration Bureau that afternoon. Her explanation of the timeline of events is fairly consistent with that outlined by Keola. The confusion arises because, while students from countries which require a visa to enter Ireland may not use their student status to gain admittance for their dependants, the situation is unclear in the the case of students from countries which do not require a visa to enter. In fact, in response to enquiries from UCC, the GNIB confirmed on two occasions that the policy was under review, and that a precedent existed under which a similar case had been admitted, subject to certain specific conditions.

These were the conditions which Keola set out to meet, and which he believed he had satisfied on his arrival in Dublin airport.

Maybe the problem here is the word “student”. While technically accurate, it is – at least in its popular connotation – inadequate to describe a man in his 40s with a family. This is not some teenage language student from a developing country trying to use “student status” as a gateway to immigration. Keola doesn’t need us, and his “take” from this country will be far less than his “give”. Why do we think we can ask highly qualified post-graduate researchers to leave their families behind in order to come and give us a year of their lives? Yes we are cocky, and puffed up with our recent prosperity, but who do we think we are fooling? I doubt that Irish universities can find too many examples of people whose affinity for Ireland is enough to attract them under those conditions. Even notwithstanding Keola’s positive disposition to Ireland he was not prepared to leave his family behind. He travelled here on the assumption that his good-faith in this regard would be respected. That it was not is a national disgrace, and I for one would not blame him if he chose to let us stew in our own self-importance while he got on with his own life and career.